A Message to President Grant

U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "December 1870." 

It matters when the United States takes the wrong side in a foreign conflict. It also matters when the United States declares neutrality. General Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States (1869 to 1877), sent to the Prussian king a message of benevolent neutrality at the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, in effect abandoning France to its fate. This is Victor Hugo’s outraged response, summoning up the ghosts of Franklin. Lincoln, John Brown, Washington, and the Polish military officer Kosciusko who helped the American revolution.

III

In this way, Americans, people inclined to prodigious efforts,

thus, land of peaceable Penn,

of fire-and-steam Fulton,

of Franklin the Prometheus,

in the living dawn of a new world,

oh great republic,

it is in your name that we take a sideways step

into the shadow!

 

Treason! Because Berlin wanted Paris destroyed!

If you are for light, do not encourage its opposite!

What is this? Has freedom become a renegade?

Is this why, coming on his frigate

Lafayette gave Rochambeau his hand?

When darkness rises, would you extinguish your torch?

What? Are you now saying, as some others say,

“Nothing is true but force.” On the end

of a long-pointed glave, a shining blade

seems to have dazzled everyone.

Bend the knee, the work of twenty centuries is wrong.

Progress is called a vile serpent —

see how it writhes in the mire —

and the idealistic people are now the selfish ones.

 

The new order decrees that

nothing definitive and absolute exists.

The master is everything; he is justice and truth.

And everything disappears: right, duty, freedom,

the future that shines before us; even Reason that led us,

divine wisdom and human wisdom,

dogma and book. Blank out Voltaire as well as Jesus,

once a German soldier puts his boot on it! —

You are so good at gallows when you forget yourselves,

casting the dawning world’s shadow

onto the world that has gone before.

 

Hanging John Brown, you taught us all a lesson

from another Golgotha on another horizon.

Ghost, untie the knot from your neck, come, oh righteous one,

come and whip this President with your august rope!

It is thanks to him that one day history,

mourning, will say with regret:

— France once rescued America, and forged

its sword, and lavished all for its deliverance,

and then, trembling reader,

America then turned to stab at France! —

 

Some savage, preferring to crawl and lie in wait,

some Huron, decorated with scalping knives,

might have made league

with this bloody leader, the King of Prussia.

Certainly, the uncivilized admire the Borusse.

It’s quite simple; he sees him as a fellow raider,

beastly, atrocious, as wild in his woods

as the Prussians in their forests.

 

To think that the man embodying

before Europe the sense of law,

the man enveloped in Columbia’s rays,

the man in whom a whole heroic world is alive,

that he now would throw himself face down

before the dreadful iron scepter

of old funeral ages,

that from the shadows he slaps Paris in the face

that he would deliver her august homeland to the emperor!

 

Let him mix it up with tyrants, murders, horror,

so that in this horrible and dark triumph it overwhelms her,

that in this bed of shame he ravished this virgin,

that he shows to the universe, on a filthy chariot,

America kissing the heel of Caesar ֫—

Oh! it makes all the great tombs shake!

 

It stirs, at the bottom of the pale catacombs,

the bones of the proud victors and the mighty vanquished!

A quivering Kosciusko wakes Spartacus;

and Madison stands and Jefferson stands —

Jackson raises both hands to block this hideous dream —

Dishonor! shouts Adams; and Lincoln rises, too,

amazed and bleeding, as on the day he was murdered.

 

Be indignant, great people. O supreme nation,

you know with what tender and filial heart I love you.

America, I cry. Oh! painful affront!

She still only had a halo’s figment on her brow.

Her starry, sidereal flag dazzled history.

Washington, galloping on his horse of glory,

had spattered the folds with sparks

of freedom’s standard, witness to duties accomplished,

and, so that from every shadow he dissipates the veils,

had superbly seeded it with stars.

 

This illustrious banner is obscured, alas!

I weep ... — Ah! be cursed, you wretch who mixes

atop the proud pavilion that a wind from heaven shakes

into the drops of light a stain of mud!